Some very specific manga recommendations

[petrea_mitchell]

As seen over here, I took it upon myself to try to recommend some not-terrible manga for a specific person, and was asked to post the list just in case it was useful to anyone else.

As I take most of my manga in animated form these days, these are largely based on experience with the adaptations. However, manga adaptations tend to stay very close to the source material, and any differences in art style are rendered moot by the fact that I'm mostly immune to art styles anyway.

The target of these recommendations has more interest in iyashikei than I do and less in comedy; additionally, I was asked to skew it toward female authors. With those conditions in place, here's what I came up with:

• Land of the Lustrous by Ichikawa Haruko (female): A posthuman tale of discovery and change. If there is one current manga that absolutely deserves more attention from the sf community, this is the one.


• Yona of the Dawn by Kusanagi Mizuho (female): Swords and sorcery in a secondary world based on Korea's Three Kingdoms period.


• Natsume's Book of Friends by Midorikawa Yuki (female): A young man learns that his grandmother enslaved many spirits, and sets about setting them all free.


• The Morose Mononokean by Wazawa Kiri (female): Another one about spirits and low-key problem solving, this one with a young man helping out an exorcist to pay a debt.


• Midnight Occult Civil Servants by Tamotsu Yōko (female): Bureaucrats handle community issues, where the community happens to be mythical creatures which have chosen to live in Tokyo.


• Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun by AidaIro (two-person team, genders unknown): A high schooler makes an unwise bargain with a school ghost and winds up as his assistant. 90% sweet and funny, 10% horror.


• Skull-face Bookseller Honda-san by "Honda" (gender unknown): The only sf content is Honda drawing themself as a skeleton to stay anonymous, but probably of interest to fans as it deals with the business of books. Apparently many people in Japan believe Honda is female, on what evidence I do not know, as there was an outcry when the anime cast a man to play Honda. Longer recommendation for the anime specifically here.


• Hakumei and Mikochi by Kashiki Takuto (male, which is very unusual for iyashikei): Forest elves and anthropomorphic animals live a quiet life enlivened by geeking out about arts and crafts. If you check out the anime, the art is gorgeous. (Hey, I said mostly immune.)


• Kokkoku by Horio Seita (male): A mixture of horror, crime story, and family drama about people with the ability to manipulate time in limited ways. I will never forgive whoever decided that to balance out the very thinky story, the anime needed a closing credits sequence with the main female characters topless. Grrr.


• Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit by Uehashi Nahoko (female): Yes, okay, this is a novel, not a manga. I was originally going to put We Rent Tsukumogami on this list, but apparently there isn't even a pirate translation of the novel out there. So having decided to give myself permission to add one novel, I'll go with Moribito.

If anyone stopping by happens to do anime as well, I have a ton of recommendations in my best of the 2010s post over at Amazing Stories. Alternatively, come join me for a weekly look at simulcast anime! My current lineup is ID: Invaded, In/Spectre, Magia Record, Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun, and Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun.

Comments

[petrea_mitchell]

Right Stuf is always the first place I look for obscure DVDs. It doesn't look like it's available for streaming anywhere in the US these days, though.

Thanks for the explanation about Honda-san, which makes me ever more curious why Honda was made male in the anime.

[hippogriff13]

Maybe because Honda wears pants, while some of the other female bookstore employees wear skirts? Although while reading volume three of the manga earlier today, I noticed that at least one other female clerk was also wearing pants.

I suspect Honda is drawn in a way that tends to make viewers assume that the character is male simply because it would be a lot more work to draw her leg bones sticking out from under her skirt in every panel that showed her entire body. (Presumably this is also why Honda is usually drawn wearing a long-sleeved shirt buttoned up to the top button at the neck.) It's obviously pretty labor-intensive just to draw Honda's head as a skull, even though the artist is quite good at it. There are occasional panels in the manga where the mangaka just draws a sketchy version of Honda with an oval for a head, with dots for eyes and a stylized horizontal-line-with-vertical-dashes-through-it "skeleton grill" mouth, instead of the anatomically correct rendition of a literal skull face that she usually depicts. This generally happens in situations where a manga with more normal-looking characters would use chibis or a similar kind of sketchily distorted simplified version of the character's "real" appearance (e.g., pouting reaction shots with duck lips).

Unfortunately, if the artist doesn't put in all the time-consuming extra work of dressing the skeleton protagonist in female-coded clothing, or doing something equally heavy-handed like sticking a bow on her head, the reader automatically tends to assume that the skeleton in question is male. Attempting to more subtly undermine this assumption by drawing Honda's shirt curved to suggest that she has breasts under it would be likely to distract the reader with speculations about how this was possible for a character who, as far as anyone outside the world portrayed within the comic is concerned, is allegedly literally composed purely of bones. Although I suppose you could assume that Honda actually does have all the usual body parts, including flesh, except that all her non-bone components are transparent or invisible. (This was explicitly stated to be the case with a minor DC Comics character who was the director of the superhero-surveillance government agency called the D.E.O. Inevitably, this guy was codenamed Mr. Bones. He appeared mostly in a good but short-lived comic called "Chase," after its official protagonist, a female D.E.O. agent called Cameron Chase.)

Anyway, I suspect the producers of the "Skull-face Bookseller Honda-san" anime just didn't feel like dealing with all these potential complications, and/or were worried about the potentially off-putting cognitive dissonance likely to be experienced by viewers unfamiliar with the manga the first time the skeleton protagonist opened her mouth and spoke in a female-sounding voice. I had to reread the panel where the male customer referred to Honda as a woman several times myself before it fully sunk in that the mangaka was tipping us off to the fact that the skull-face bookseller was female.